Emmanuel Macron Steps Into France’s Political Void

PARIS — Insults and rumors keep coming: His speeches are too long and full of feel-good banalities. He does not have a real program. His time in government was a failure. He is secretly gay. He is developing a personality cult. He favors capitalism, and besides, he is too young.

If any surer sign was needed that Emmanuel Macron, the 39-year-old former minister of the economy, is the new front-runner in France’s presidential race, look no further than the concentrated volley of wild attacks against him. Even the Russians, via pro-Kremlin websites, are piling on.

Mr. Macron has glided artfully unto the breach. The youthful Mr. Macron is increasingly seen as the one who will turn back the tide of authoritarian populism, the nonpolitician who will defeat Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front.

But perhaps the only thing more improbable for France than electing Ms. Le Pen would be to elect Mr. Macron.

Despite Ms. Le Pen’s best efforts to remake her party, the National Front has traditionally been too toxic for a majority of French to embrace. So even though she currently leads in the polls, hardly anyone expects her to make it through the second round of the country’s two-stage voting this spring to become president.

Yet Mr. Macron has never been elected to anything. He served two largely unsuccessful years directing France’s vast but sluggish economy, with scant accomplishment in his wake. He is not a member of either major party, or of any party, and is disliked by many of the Socialists in whose government he served. He claims to transcend the parties.

While he has pushed a message that includes doses from left, right and center — maintain France’s social protections, keep the country in the European Union and lighten the burden on business — it is a strategy that has also made him the candidate offering something just about everyone can hate.

Or, perhaps more damning in France, it has risked making him into a mannequin candidate who stands for nothing.

“Emmanuel Macron doesn’t want to define himself, and it’s becoming a problem,” Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, a Socialist heavyweight and the party’s secretary, said recently. “Meanwhile, it’s all a little bit hollow.”

When Mr. Macron started his campaign, snickers about his new movement’s name — “En Marche,” or, “On Our Way” — all but drowned out whatever message the young minister was trying to project. “On our way — to what?” the skeptics asked.

That questions remains largely unanswered even as he now gains traction.

A small stream of Socialist members of Parliament have signed on, despite threats of excommunication from the party, as well as some business and political leaders.

Mr. Macron is married to his former high school drama teacher — this fascinates his countrymen — who is 24 years his senior, and he caused a scandal in his provincial hometown, Amiens, by wooing her. He is a former investment banker with Rothschild & Company, low on the list of most admired professions.

Yet Mr. Macron and his wife, Brigitte, have been on the cover of Paris Match four times in the last year. The glossy magazine has published photographs of the minister giving a bottle to his wife’s grandchildren.

On Monday, he brought the gay rumors into the open, joking about them in a speech, to the surprise of French media: “It’s disagreeable for Brigitte,” Mr. Macron said. “She’s asking how I pull this off, physically. She shares my life from morning to night — and I’ve never paid her for it,” he added, slyly evoking the nepotism scandal engulfing Mr. Fillon for having kept his wife on the public payroll for no detectable work.

Overflow crowds and packed rallies in recent weeks have surprised commentators. In Lyon last weekend 8,000 people packed into the sports stadium to hear him, forcing thousands more out on to the grounds to watch Mr. Macron on giant screens.

He spoke for nearly two hours, his face turned up in a kind of rapture, frequently addressing the crowd as his friends.

There were many vague promises of hope and unity, and above all, delight in the huge crowd that had come out. “Your presence, this wall of presences around me, this is living proof that we really are here,” Mr. Macron said, beaming.

“It’s a demonstration of desire,” he told the crowd, “the desire to picture a new future,” he continued, in a literary language he says was imbibed early during a studious childhood, in his new campaign book — commentators have mocked the grandeur of the title — “Revolution.”

In his speech Mr. Macron claimed the mantle of left, right, center, Charles de Gaulle, and other factions, as well as writers like Émile Zola, Charles Péguy and René Char, all under the floating aegis of a “will to assemble” and “reconciliation.”

“And the Gaullists,” he said, “did they not carry in their genes this will to assemble, this will not to capitulate to any faction, this incompatibility with conservatism, hatred of the other, and of division?”

The crowd erupted in cheers of “Macron, President!”

He spoke of lowering taxes on companies, restraining capitalism, swiped at the “obscurantism” of Trump’s America and denounced the National Front for “betraying fraternity because it detests those faces that don’t resemble it.”

Mostly, it wasn’t concise or specific, but the crowd had not come for that.

In contrast to Ms. Le Pen, Mr. Macron has been mocked for being the darling of the “bourgeois bohemians,” and for his awkwardness among the working classes. He was egged in a communist suburb last year and admonished a young man to get a job to pay for a suit.

But those who braved the cold in Lyon — doctors, professors, self-described “company heads,” civil servants and many young people — appeared seduced by his high-flown rhetoric.

“Liberty, equality, fraternity: I don’t know any other candidate who understands it so well,” said Pierre-Alexandre Le Guerm, a 35-year-old town planner. “He’s got a lot of courage, in a world where ideologies are dividing people. With his candidacy, we can have some hope.”

“With him, all the ideas are coming up from the base,” said Monique Janin, 78, who was there with her husband, Raymond, 80, who had worked in the chemical industry. “He’s just much more dynamic,” she said of Mr. Macron. “It’s about much more than simply criticizing others.”

“He’s got clear ideas, and he’s not a divider,” said Geneviève Kepenekian, 70, a retired doctor. “And he’s a realist. His idea is, get the money from different sources.”

“He’s open. He’s new. He’s bringing people together. And he goes off the beaten path,” said Thomas Buy, 37, who said he had a string of beauty salons in the Lyon area.

“It was pretty general,” Mr. Buy conceded. “We’ll have to wait a little longer to see. But one senses a real fervor.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: A 39-Year-Old Steps Into France’s Political Void, and the Attacks Flow Freely. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe